Eutropian with VIC and the other 9 projects supported by Advocate Europe were featured in Changer – A Stronger Europe Through Continental Obstacles. Take a look!

Concerned with the future of social services and welfare systems in European cities, the project, Funding the Cooperative City, by the Rome-based association Eutropian, is positioned at the interface of urbanism and activism. Working through an established network of actors from Southern and Eastern European cities, the project explores visions for the city of tomorrow, where social services are provided by citizen networks and where cooperative urban development prevails. Through a series of workshops in Budapest, Madrid, and Rome as well as a publication, the outcomes will be spread throughout Europe.

Last year the Dutch Embassy in Rome and the Consulate General in Milan called out for urban projects about Food, Water and Energy. The purpose for this open call was to get Dutch and Italian architects, researchers and other creatives to work together on urban challenges. This resulted in a successful programme of Dutch Italian collaborations. For this evening we invited four of these projects to Amsterdam to tell us how they worked together, the different urban challenges and future projects.

The objective of Il mercato al centro was to explore with experts working in the Netherlands which could be the future role of markets in the reanimation of the neighbourhoods from a social point of view as a service to the citizen, from the health one thanks to quality food, from an environmental one with short chain food distribution and lastly from an economic one supporting local production.

Il mercato al centro is a cooperation of Eutropian, the TUTUR project of the City of Rome,TSPOON and supported by the Dutch Embassy in Rome.

Join us for a weekend of hands on workshops at R-Urban Wick in the Mobile Garden City. 10.30AM – 5PM

Levente Polyak from the EUTROPIAN project will be joining us on Saturday to interview some of the participants and give a short presentation about EUTROPIAN. Levente is a researcher and urban planner, specialised in urban regeneration, cultural development, community participation, local economic development and social innovation. He will give a short presentation in the shed at 1pm – just before/during lunch.

New Life for Markets is a project that aims at elaborating strategies to revitalize declining marketplaces. Marketplaces have traditionally constituted some of the most important public spaces, attracting people from all ways of lives and all financial capabilities. In the past decades, however, they gradually lost their role: while urban and metropolitan agriculture are flourishing, and an increasing number of enterprises work on short chain food distribution, many markets in European cities are abandoned or underused. The project explores the possibilities to renew markets as public spaces, by connecting them to new agriculture initiatives, by inviting various actors to play a role in their renewal, and by creating viable economic models for their maintenance and vitality, by including new social and cultural functions.

In October and November 2015, we organized workshops at the markets of Pigneto and Metronio to bring together protagonists of the marketplace revival. Emanuela Liverani and Federico Greco made a film of these events, looking at both the architectural and social dimensions of these markets. Watch the film here.

Following the lead of the upcoming Dutch EU Presidency, the European urban policy community is actively working on the preparation of an Urban Agenda. The aim is to promote cooperation between European, national and city level representatives and stakeholders so as to stimulate growth, liveability and innovation. In order to better understand how to engage civil society organisations, the Dutch Presidency invited the EESC to express its opinion on this issue.

It is within this context that the EESC is organising a public hearing on Partnership for urban development – Future of the EU Urban Agenda. The purpose of the hearing is to gather suggestions from representatives of civil society organisations as well as experts in the field of urban development, and discuss them with institutional representatives in view of channelling findings into the EESC’s opinion. The event will take place on 14 December 2015 from 2.30 p.m. at the EESC’s premises.

Creative placemaking and sustainable urban development are among the most intriguing current challenges. How can designers, urban planners, architects, cultural operators, and other creative minds contribute? What role can abandoned industrial spaces play in industrial towns and cities? How can new technologies be used for cities’ development and transformation? How can new ways of engaging citizens and attracting tourists help to (re)create cities, towns, and places? Modern cultural institutions: how do they help create places and implement cultural strategies, while engaging business, art, and policy actors?

The aim of this year’s edition of the Open Up! Creative Placemaking festival is to answer these questions and discuss culture driven urban development. The event will bring together policy makers, artists, representatives of cultural institutions, architects, designers, and the general public to discuss how to use the arts and culture in order to design better cities.